Swarming effects have powerful possibilities. When hundreds of thousands of people do just a little work for free it can perform the same tasks that hundreds of people could have done full time for quite a bit of money. The new high speed internet is the most obvious place to utilize this type of system. No one could have imagined such a complete encyclopedia as Wikipedia before there were so many of us nerds ready to show off our intellect, wit, and extraordinary skills at internet research.
This isn't news to the folks who have been driving these swarm effect sites such as digg.com, a social bookmarking website that delivers it's users news, and interesting links for anything between "do it yourself" projects to the latest playable web games to videos of people falling on their bum. They created such a popular site by beginning with the most simple of systems.
- Let users submit a link.
- Submitted links go to the same pile no matter who submitted it.
- All users can vote that a site belongs on the index page.
- Everything and everyone is equal.
And viola! With thousands of users online just aching to contribute at any given second, stories get put into the digg pile at an unbelievable rate. Users vote on a story, and you have (in theory) an exact average of what the entire user base believes the index page should look like. Any system is going to have it's share of glitches, but as long as it's getting it near what the average should be they're doing good, right? For instance some users might learn some techniques that will help them get their stories to the front page more effectively then others. Certain words or key phrases have been proven to get people to digg your submission without even looking at it. "AWEOME NEW MAC WII GADGET KEVIN ROSE! AMMMAAAZING!" will surely get you front paged if you get it there before enough people declare it as lame and it's "buried" (something like deleted, but not exactly.)
The anonymity of the internet assures that the digg user base will contain at least some amount of pre-teens. Everyone uses the internet these days, but the acceptance-thirsty kids and young adults have dominated the web since it's early years. The installation of some new implements to digg have provided negative effects in the hands of it's particular brand of some users.
The friend system
On digg, you can add someone as your friend as you chose. This doesn't do much. It doesn't invite them to your next dinner party. It doesn't send them an email automatically the day before you're moving to ask for help. It just puts every action they perform on digg in a convenient little place for you to watch, and puts a little green flag on any story they had a part of in some way (either they submitted it, dugg it, or commented on it.) The idea of course is that the people who often bring you stories you like are likely to continue doing just that. This creates a problem though. Suddenly there's a hierarchy. If someone has submitted 100 stories that made it to the index, lots and lots of users have been subjected to that submitter. At least a certain percentage of those users will add the submitter as a friend after reading each story. Now if a brand new user and a relatively "famous" user submit the same story, even if the new user links to a more informative article with a better headline the well known user's story will still be front paged first, because so many people will see his submission in their friends activity field. The end result can often mean worse content for digg.
Comment voting
The internet is full of assholes. There, I said it. Places where comments and discussion can be had will quickly come to contain comments that don't add anything to the debate, contain offensive language, or people trying to get you to go their web page, in ANY venue on the internet. Digg's solutions to this problem was to let users vote any comment either up or down.
With the impressionable age of a chunk of digg users, however, this becomes an issue. They form their opinion around the opinions of other users to insure they won't be shamed by the snarky, angry remarks of some digg users who disagree with anyone on anything. In any collective greater minds (technology fans tend to be just that) there is a constant struggle of the less confident to place themselves as close to head hancho as possible. This negativity, combined with the impressionable youth of many diggers has created a phenomenon where what determines the vote on comments is which way it goes first, in many instances. If a young digger sees a comment with -1 diggs, he/she will read that comment without really reading it. His/her only real interest in it is finding something within the comment to correct, nitpick, or argue against so that he can hear his own voice (so to speak) and hopefully get even just one person to think he's smart. This sometimes buries comments that gave a valid point. No comments are ever actually deleted though, so comments that are buried are simply minimized until you click a button out of curiosity to what that user said. A little known secret is that everyone reads them. In fact buried comments might just be more likely to be read than comments with an average amount of positive diggs. It doesn't hide any questionable or shitty comment, and makes everyone censor themselves in silly ways. A person who thinks the PS3 will be a success for example, should be afraid to say so, as a comment saying such a thing (even if it's in a respectful way) will likely be buried by Nintendo Wii zealots. The end result can often mean worse comments for digg.
Digg is an amazing system. I frequent the site daily. I even comment on occasion. It would be entirely incorrect to say that digg.com is on a path to destruction, or that it will never be as good as it was in the beginning. It can and probably will be improved at some point. However the move away from bare simplicity is quickly making it a less enjoyable experience for many users and less effective at what it does; provide interesting links.
